


All the World's a Stage

by clandestinerabbit



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: Alternate Universe - Theatre, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 17:00:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17832569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clandestinerabbit/pseuds/clandestinerabbit
Summary: Riley hasn’t helmed Pluto Playhouse through six successful seasons by only putting on plays that make her happy. That said, after a season that began with Death of a Salesman and ended with Streetcar Named Desire, she thinks she deserves a bit of fun. Putting on plays is fun, putting on her uncle's play is better, putting on her uncle's play so she can matchmake everyone she loves—and herself—is the most fun of all.





	All the World's a Stage

Riley hasn’t helmed Pluto Playhouse through six successful seasons by only putting on plays that make her happy. That said, after a season that began with _Death of a Salesman_ and ended with _Streetcar Named Desire_ , she thinks she deserves a bit of fun.

“Isn’t it nepotism to put on a play your uncle wrote?” her best male friend Farkle asks.

She throws a Sour Patch Kid his general direction. “Uncle Josh was in the running for the Pulitzer last time, and you know it. It’s prestigious. Our subscribers will fawn over us. Not to mention, he’s not my nephew.”

Farkle picks up the candy and pops it in his mouth. “Not to mention, putting on his play means he’ll be hanging around the theater all day every day. Watching rehearsals. Sitting in design meetings.”

She opens her eyes as wide as Bambi’s. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Riley.” Farkle looks over the rim of the hipster frames he wears to turn his innate nerdiness into something resembling an Image and hits her with a Look. “You know you can’t force this.”

“Who’s forcing anything?” she asks, dropping all pretense since Farkle sees through it anyway. “It’s not my fault Maya has a crush on Uncle Josh bigger than _Phantom_ ’s gross box office.”

“Worldwide.”

“Exactly!” She flaps her hand. “There will be no forcing, Farkle! It’s just. . .creating an opportunity. People fall in love in rehearsals who don’t even _like_ each other when they begin. There’s no way something doesn’t happen.”

“Uh-huh.” Farkle leans forward to shuffle through the papers spread out over the table between them. “And your suggested casting. . .”

THE picture slides from the stack of resumes and headshots and pierces her with its gaze, even in black and white. Riley feels a goofy grin spread across her face, and Farkle makes a disgruntled noise as he shoves Lucas Friar back into the pile.

“It’s a bad idea to get involved with a Face,” he warns, “you’ve seen it go nuclear more times than you can count.”

“Just because he’s pretty doesn’t mean he can’t act. Smackle thinks it’s a good idea.”

Farkle slides further down in his seat. “Like that’s supposed to convince me,” he mutters. “Anyway, she’s only the sound designer. What does she know.”

“And you’re only the lighting designer.” Riley leans back in her chair and folds her hands together, feeling rather like the villain in a movie who is about to get everything she wants. Except she’s a benevolent villain who wants to give everyone else everything they want. All she needs is a cat. “Trust Riley. Everything will be fine.”

“You’re headed for disaster,” Farkle says, so she throws another Sour Patch Kid at him. His smug grin as he catches it in his mouth and chews happily, she ignores. Who is the director here, anyway.

And, because she is a brilliant director of not only plays but also lives, everything goes just as she intends. Maya might greet the news of what play they’re doing with her trademark “yeah hi whatever I don’t care,” but even she can’t pretend that she isn’t beyond excited about the prospect of working with Josh Matthews. His play about a Western hero coming to grips (or not) with his self-mythologizing is just a bonus.

“I think I’m going to make the sets look like cardboard,” she tells Riley excitedly. “Of course everything in the West was already style not substance, I mean look at the false fronts of most of the buildings—”

“How did you—”

“Your dad, of course.” They both nod and move on. “Josh really likes the idea too. We’re thinking we want old-fashioned painted backdrops to evoke the collective memories of the era but they need to be almost garish, larger than life—Josh says the whole point of Roy is that he can’t be real—”

“And when,” Riley asks as casually as she can, “did you have this conversation with Uncle Josh?”

Maya becomes very interested in the sketch she’s doodling on a corner of a mocked-up promotional poster. “Oh, here and there. We had tacos the other night.”

“Diiid you?”

After so many years, Maya doesn’t have to see Riley to know what face she’s making. She shouldn’t have mentioned Josh at all, but she also couldn’t really help it. That doesn’t mean she has to put up with this. “Honey,” she says without looking up, a clear warning in her tone.

“Peaches.”

“Stop it.”

“I just want you to be happy!”

“I am happy!” Maya flings out her arms to the theater around them, shadowed and full of promise. “Every day I do work I love with my best friend _and_ we get paid for it. I’m going to design sets for a play that will probably win a ton of awards. What’s not to be happy about?”

“You know what.”

“Eh. Boys are overrated.”

“Uncle Josh hasn’t been a boy for a long time,” Riley says wisely, and much as Maya agrees with her she can’t admit it verbally. Her face gives everything away, but there’s nothing she can do about that. She wishes there was. If she could hide how she feels she could maybe pretend that he could possibly feel the same way at some point, instead of knowing he knows and doesn’t choose to act on it, however kind he is to her otherwise. It’s just the way her life goes. And really, it’s a good one overall. She’ll just pine forever. It’s cool.

Shaking her hair out of her face, she shoves the design over to Riley. “What do you think Farkle will make of this?” she asks.

And because Riley is a good friend, she accepts Maya’s change of topic and bends over the drawing speculatively. “Something brilliant, probably,” she says. “You know Farkle.”

“If he can stop arguing with Smackle long enough to get things done.”

Riley disagrees. “He works better with Smackle around. You know this. This is why I bring her in at the beginning of the process, when she really doesn’t have to be there until closer to the end.”

“I thought that was because you shipped them,” Maya says, taking back her drawing and chewing on the end of her pencil.

“What?” Riley opens her eyes innocently wide. “Noooo.”

She really has to get better at her innocent expressions, Maya thinks. Or stop trying to set people up. Only the fact that Farkle and Smackle are the most oblivious beans on the face of the planet keeps them from being very, very upset with their director.

“Wait.” Riley frowns. “You went to get to tacos and you didn’t bring me any? What kind of friend are you?”

“Um, the kind that you begged not to let you eat tacos ever again a month ago?”

“That was then. This is now. Or whenever you and Uncle Josh went to tacos and didn’t invite me.”

Maya wisely neglects to tell Riley it’s been tacos three times and Thai food twice. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Instead she pushes the revised drawing over and taps it with her pencil. “How does this look?”

“Ambitious.”

“The play deserves it.”

Riley tips her head to one side, considering. “I guess there _is_ a gunfight to close out the first act. The scope is warranted.”

Maya nods. If she needed to defend her work she could, but it’s better if she doesn’t have to whip out the Paco’s Tacos napkin with the long list of arguments she and Josh came up with on their second not-really-date. “Have you talked to Smarkle about the gunfight, by the way?”

“Yes.” Riley shakes her head no.

“What does that mean?”

“I have sat in the same room with them while they discussed things vaguely related to the subject. That’s as far as it’s gone.”

Maya appeals to the ceiling. “Oy vey, when will those two get over their petty rivalry and get their act together?”

“Oh,” Riley says, gathering up her tablet and papers nonchalantly, “sooner than we think, I expect.”

“ _Riles_.”

Riley’s nonchalance has the shelf-life of a yellow banana—generally because she’s using it to hide something—and it doesn’t take much to make her crack. In this particular instance, she blurts out “Gottogomeetingmyleadingman” and leaves in a flurry.

“Convenient excuse!” Maya shouts after her, then flips her pencil around to adjust one last thing. Just because she’s beginning to think this whole production is nothing more than an excuse for match-making, it doesn’t mean she isn’t going to create the best darn Western ever portrayed on stage. She shades with one hand and types out a message with the other:

[To: Peaches] take pictures I need his coloring for costumes and stuff

[From: Peaches] That can be arranged <3 ;) <3

Picture taking with Lucas goes so well Riley sees no reason why it shouldn’t be A Thing and promptly begins encouraging her cast and crew to take candid photos and little videos to post on social media. Josh worries a little about it damaging the play’s prestige, but Riley pooh-poohs him firmly.

“Fans _love_ it,” she says. “It builds buzz on the ground where we need it—critics will come to the play anyway, because you wrote it. This play is all we’re doing this season, buddy. We need audiences.”

“I told you to have a fallback,” he mutters, continuing his slow crawl through the SunsetHeroPlay tag.

Riley grabs his arm and shakes it fiercely. “We don’t need it! The play is going to be great. Everyone will love it. We’re just ensuring we have high demand out the gate.”

He makes a noncommittal noise.

“You’re not very secure for an award-winning playwright, are you?”

“Hey.”

“Hey,” Riley says, scrunching her nose goofily. Then she leans over and wraps her arms around his shoulders, resting her chin on her arm to peer at his screen. He keeps scrolling.

A movement rehearsal, the cast all in loose, colorful t-shirts.

Riley with the script book in hand, forceful and commanding.

A Boomerang with three thousand likes of the leading man in a cowboy hat, winking. “Did you take that?” he asks. His niece shrugs, which means yes.

Actors in small clumps, laughing.

Him and Maya, heads nearly touching as they lean over her sketchbook. He tries to move past that one before Riley can comment. Of course he fails.

“She’s outdoing herself for you,” she says soberly.

“She’s always been this talented,” he says.

“I knew that before you did. That’s not what I mean.” Riley comes around again to look him straight in the eye. Their family is goofy most of the time but when they’re earnest, man, they’re earnest. “What are you doing, Uncle Josh? Because I will punch you if you’re just playing around.”

She clearly means it—and why wouldn’t she? He holds her gaze to be sure she knows how much he means this. “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m not playing around. She deserves to be taken seriously.”

“What do you mean you don’t know what you’re doing? You have three more years of life experience under your belt!”

“Not in this,” he says, still staring at the picture. “This is new.”

Riley doesn’t say anything, just watches him for a minute with a gooey smile and a glint of—is that?—smug satisfaction on her face. “Well,” she says finally, “you’ve still got a few weeks before it makes exactly zero sense for you to be hanging around her anymore. Make the most of it. You can start by liking that picture.”

So Josh does. Later. Where no one else can see him do it. He also likes all of Farkle’s artsy booth shots, many of which feature Smackle, thinking it will look better to the general public. Maybe it does, but it also leads to an awkward confrontation by craft services where Smackle tells him in no uncertain terms that his attentions are flattering but unwelcome.

“I didn’t—”

“I know, I know,” Smackle says as patiently as she can, pushing her thick-rimmed glasses up her nose, “which is why I’m not taking this further. I just didn’t want you to suffer unnecessarily.”

Josh Matthews’ mouth curves upward. Like Riley, he’s almost always smiling, so Smackle can’t tell if he’s amused or hiding a broken heart. She has done her duty either way. Shaking his head, he says “I just thought the pictures were good. I know you’re unavailable.”

“I am not.”

“Oh. I thought you and Farkle—”

“Farkle is my colleague,” Smackle says firmly. The fact that she also thinks he’s brilliant and not a little hunky has no bearing on the other facts of the situation. Namely, that their professional relationship overpowers anything else their relationship could be.

“Sorry,” Riley’s Uncle Josh says again. Smackle peers up at him.

“Regardless, I understand there is a certain code applicable in these kind of situations. All this is very new to me, but I have never failed a test before and I don’t intend to start now.”

“What kind of situations?”

He is clearly amused now, but Smackle believes in giving people answers to their questions and explains patiently. “When one has a female friend who has feelings for a certain male, one is not allowed to (a) also have feelings for that certain male; (b) engage in behavior that could be construed as mating rituals with that certain male; or (c) permit any behavior that could be construed as mating rituals to be directed at oneself by that certain male. This clearly falls into category C. I”—she indicates herself—“am one. You”—she indicates him—“are that certain male.”

“And the female friend?”

Smackle believes in giving people answers to their questions, but she also believes that sometimes people are too stupid to be helped. She gives Riley’s Uncle Josh a withering stare and exits the conversation.

The next time Farkle posts a picture of Smackle, Josh intentionally doesn’t like it. Two thousand other people do, though, which surprises Smackle enough that she feels it necessary to congratulate her arch-nemesis.

He only looks at her blankly. “Thanks? I don’t really care about that. It’s only to make Riley happy.”

“Still,” Smackle persists, “to take a picture that pleases such a range of people requires a certain level of skill.”

“It’s algorithms.” He shrugs. “Artsy lighting + black and white filter + engrossing subject + appropriate timing = popularity.” He goes back to his computer, where he’s running a lighting simulation on a rough model Maya’s mocked up for him. They’re thinking about casting long shadows across the stage, but they don’t want to hide the actors’ faces and balancing the two is proving difficult. He hasn’t put his headphones in, though, or he’d miss her next question:

“You find me engrossing?”

Farkle sputters, startled. That’s not what he said at all, but he’s also aware of the definition of engrossing and he can’t lie and say he doesn’t. Smackle _is_ engrossing. Before her, he prided himself on being able to work through any distractions life managed to throw his way including, literally, a hurricane. He is a professional. Or he was, until Riley picked Smackle up from who knows where and told him to make a place for her in the booth on a permanent basis. His objections had, at first, been solely professional, but now Farkle thinks there was a certain amount of subconscious self-preservation at play. Whenever Smackle’s around, all his natural talent and carefully honed skill seems to short out— _brrzzt!_ —leaving him unable to do anything more constructive than fumble blindly around his computer programs and take a series of, though he says it himself, brilliant Instas. He had to turn his desk around to get any work done on this play at all. “Yeah,” he says, trying to play it cool. “People who are really passionate about their work are always engrossing.”

Smackle looks back down at her phone. He remembers the picture he took without being able to see the screen: her with her headphones on, frowning in concentration as she leans over the soundboard to mess with two different gains at the same time. She looks kind of like a DJ despite the hipster glasses and prim dresses, but mostly she looks like someone totally absorbed in something that makes her one hundred percent happy, and he’s kind of astounded that he managed to capture that.

“I don’t really understand,” she says slowly, “what it means to be passionate about something. People have always said that I was...obsessive. Is that the same thing?”

This is uncharted territory for them, and Farkle isn’t quite sure he knows how to deal with it. They don’t have _conversation_. They have _discussion_ or sometimes _debate_. But the careful delicacy in her question demands he take it seriously, so he spins his chair around to fully face her and adjusts his glasses as he thinks of the right response. “Obsessive is the negative way to say it,” he answers finally. “People who don’t understand how you can love a thing they don’t call passion obsession. Like, think about Riley and the Knicks.”

Smackle leans forward and lowers her voice. “She does get unnecessarily loud about them.”

“But Knicks fans—from what I understand, not being one myself—think that’s normal. They wouldn’t think she was really a fan if she didn’t get like that.”

“Who can say how people ought to love a thing, though?”

A valid point, and one Farkle has often beseeched the universe about as well. “They do anyway. People put all kinds of rules on how you ought to care about things.”

She nods thoughtfully. “I don’t think I care about my work in an inappropriate way. I think I care about it exactly as much as I need to in order to do it well.”

“Maybe you care about it more than most people,” he says, “but you’re better at it than anyone else I know, too, so it’s not a bad thing.”

This time he knows what he’s said, and he doesn’t look away when she glances up at him, eyes wide behind her lenses. “You said I’m better than anyone else?”

“I did.” He’s probably breaking every unspoken rule that bounds their relationship, but she started it and also he doesn’t care. Unless she does. “Is...that all right?”

“Yes,” she says soberly. “Because I think you’re better than anyone else, too. I mean—” She grimaces, then nods. “That’s what I mean.”

“At my job,” he clarifies.

“Yes, of course,” she says, pulling a face and turning back to her own work. “What else?”

Frankly, he hardly knows. All he can be certain of is that even facing away from her with his headphones in he has a difficult time concentrating, and that when he casts glances over his shoulder he meets her embarrassed eyes more than once.

Naturally, no one says anything when Smarkle choreographs—there isn’t another name for the graceful interplay of sound, movement, and light—a battle the likes of which hasn’t been seen on stage since _West Side Story_. It was getting down to the wire anyway and Smarkle are professionals; they would never have let their tension, professional or otherwise, get in the way of doing good work. If Riley goes out and buys a white kitten after she sees the plans, she swears up and down it’s apropos of nothing.

“You know, when I wanted to be a dictator,” Farkle says, stroking Violet from top to tip, “I had a list of Necessary Items. ‘Cat’ was third on this list after ‘Cape’ and ‘Goon Squad’.”

“I’m not a dictator, Farkle,” Riley says with half her attention, far more concerned at this exact moment with the quick change that keeps sending her lead actress out on stage without her boots. “For the love of Pete, what are the dressers doing back there?!”

“Hoop skirts are tricky.”

“Not that tricky,” Riley glares. These people are professionals, after all. A six-foot hoop skirt is not beyond their skill level. “If I can train a cat to use the litter box _and_ direct this play _and_ match-make my uncle and my best friend at the _same time_ , they can manage to get her boots on in eight seconds.”

“I do not understand how that is comparable,” Smackle says, too quickly to be forestalled by Farkle’s warning signals. “While training a cat does indeed require a great deal of attention and intentionality, you’ve already accomplished much of the work for the play, and the developing relationship between your Uncle and Maya is clearly self-sustaining. They need no encouragement to engage in courtship rituals.”

Riley may be a dedicated director, but she’s been a niece and a best friend for much longer, and she knows where her priorities lie. Spinning her chair around, she skewers Smackle with all the intensity formerly directed at her hapless dressers. It must be intense, because Smackle, who once made flashcards to recognize non-verbal cues, shrinks back a little. “You know something,” Riley says.

“I know many things,” Smackle agrees, albeit warily.

“ _What_ do you know?”

“Well,” Smackle says, “I know that you should really give the dressers another twelve seconds on that change to ensure both the blood bags and her boots are in their appropriate places.”

Farkle makes a _yikes_ face. Riley smiles sweetly. “Thank you for your input, Smackle. I will take that into consideration. What do you know about Uncle Josh and Maya?”

“I know nothing. I infer that, since Maya has ceased overtly referencing her future nuptials and instead begun smiling more often than she frowns, and your uncle has stayed in the theatre past two a.m. three times in the last five days, ostensibly working but really sleeping until Maya is done so he can walk her home, that something has shifted between them.”

“He _what_?” Riley nearly shrieks, horrified that something so enormous is happening in _her theatre_ without her knowledge.

“And,” Smackle adds, “they were at Schmackary’s last Wednesday together for nearly three hours. To my understanding, that would be an odd activity for their relationship as it has previously stood.”

Farkle shifts uneasily in his seat, hoping desperately that Riley doesn’t think to ask how Smackle knows they were in Schmackary’s for three hours, because that could be embarrassing for all involved. Happily, a long-standing ship trumps a new one.

“Who paid?” Riley screeches, “did they spring for the sundae? Were there two spoons? How did I not know about this?”

Smackle and Farkle look at each other helplessly. “You have other things on your mind?” Farkle offers. “As you should, really, considering press night is in a week.”

That reminder, understandably, sobers Riley right up, and she throws her head back and slumps in her chair with a loud groan. “Why is everything happening at once? I can’t handle all this. I should take Violet back to a shelter because clearly she’s going to end up as a street cat when I can’t take care of her. The set is going to fall down and the actors are going to forget their lines and we’ll get horrible reviews and that will be the end of the Playhouse.”

“Is there no measure of equilibrium in your emotional responses?” Smackle asks.

“Only the appropriate ones!” Riley shoves to her feet and slams her notebook closed. “Keep the cat, Farkle. She can haunt the theatre when it’s a deserted ruin.” Then she disappears from the room in a whirlwind of hair and panic, leaving Farkle, Smackle, and Violet to blink at each other.

“Will she be all right?” Smackle asks. “Should we bring her Schmackary’s next time we go?”

“She’s always like this before press week,” Farkle says, “We just batten down the hatches until everything turns out perfectly, which it always does.” Then he reconsiders. “But cookies couldn’t hurt.”

Cookies don’t hurt, but they don’t help—Riley grips the play’s reins with one hand even as she stuffs her face with the other, and even the leading man, who basically worships the ground she walks on, starts to look a little wan. Josh has never been around his niece at this point in the rehearsal process, and he’s a little alarmed by the transformation.

“No, she really is always like this,” Maya maintains, even though the bags under her eyes could hold more than Mary Poppins’.

Josh cants his head, ostensibly watching the stage crew moving around the set pieces but really eyeing Riley out of his peripheral vision. “She’s so...intense.”

“I don’t know where you got the idea that your niece wasn’t intense. Have you met her parents? Do you know Auggie?”

“She just always seemed the most chill,” he says.

“Maybe,” Maya allows, “maybe she’s less intense than her neurotic father and her legal shark mother and her opera-singing brother. But you can’t succeed in this business without being really driven and passionate, and she is succeeding.”

“It’s going to be really good,” he says, almost as though he’s realizing it for the first time. Of course he knew that, in the back of his head, but now they’re so close, now that he’s watching the pieces come together like magic, he almost can’t believe _how_ good it’s going to be. “The best staging of any of my plays, by far.”

“You have to say that,” Maya mutters, still sketching—what, he doesn’t know, since all the designs for the show are long done—her hair all in her face, intentionally not meeting his eyes.

“Hey.”

He waits until she looks up, pushing her hair behind her ear so he can see the curve of her cheek and one eye. “I don’t have to say it, Maya. What you guys have created here, it’s something more exciting than anything I’ve seen before. And you know I’ve seen a lot of plays.”

She gives him a smile that doesn’t go any further than the corners of her mouth. “Thank you, Josh. But it’s only going to be exciting if it works.”

“Why would you think it’s not going to work?”

“Things I work really hard at don’t usually work out the way I planned,” she says, and he would like very much to punch whoever made Maya Hart so resigned to disappointment. “It’s better not to get my hopes up too early.”

He has always been good at listening for what people aren’t saying, but he doesn’t have to work hard to hear what Maya’s leaving out. “What’s the worst that could happen?” he asks as carefully as he can.

“Oh,” she says, like she’s not listing off the things that keep her up at night, “the sets could fall over and kill someone, or just fall over. Or people could come and love everything about it except my designs, and write about them in the reviews. Or the whole thing could flop, and then none of us would get paid for this season until Riley scrabbles something together at the last minute.”

“Don’t you have subscriber money?”

“Josh.”

“Maya,” he says, half-teasing, half-stern. She smiles in spite of herself and he cheers inwardly. “None of that’s going to happen. Okay? It isn’t.”

“It might.”

“Okay, it might,” he allows, “but someone could forget their lines just as easily, or the dressers could mess up again, or the theater could be hit by a meteor. Barring the last one, those kinds of things happen in theaters all over this city every day. Has anyone’s career ever been totally destroyed because of it?”

“How would we know?” She throws up her hands beseechingly. “If their career is destroyed we’ll never have heard of them. Think it through, Matthews.”

“It’s not going to happen,” he says firmly, bumping her shoulder with his. “Tell you what: when everything goes perfectly opening night, I’m taking you out to dinner. Wherever you want. Whenever you want. Fancy, in our pajamas on a couch with Chinese.”

“Are you asking me on a date, Boing?” Her eyes are too deep to meet without falling in, but he refuses to be the one to look away.

“Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

She looks at him like he’s just punched her in the gut, but suddenly the depths turn dappled, light-flecked and golden. “Well then,” she says, “you’ll have to hope for both of us, because this just officially jumped levels in ‘things Maya hopes will happen and therefore probably won’t.’”

“It’s okay,” he says, confident. “Everything will be great.”

And then one of the set pieces actually does fall over on opening night, a giant faux-cardboard building face-planting on the stage just at the climax of the second act, narrowly missing their lead actress and causing more than one scream in the theater.

Riley does not scream, but she does drop her lighted pen and breaks the bulb.

Maya calmly gets up from her third-row observation seat and disappears.

Josh’s stomach sinks.

Farkle and Smackle stare at each other for the space of a breath, black-rimmed horror meeting its twin. In the next breath, they are already moving, throwing switches and cueing tracks, adding an effect that sounds like a creaking house and a light that looks like dust swirling across the stage and a single spotlight on the leading man, who blinks into the beam like it comes from God himself. “Come on, Face.” Farkle’s lips barely move. “Show me you’ve got a brain in there somewhere.”

Miraculously, he does.

The leading man walks slowly over to the fallen set piece, the thuds of his boot-steps echoing weightily in the silent theater (a nice trick by Smackle, since of course his stage-shoes are silent). Shoulders slumping under the knowledge that his world is literally crashing down around him, he stares, silent, his back to the audience in defiance of the first rule of theatre and celebration of the hours of mandatory movement rehearsal Riley insisted would enable them to act without speaking. Then, in a rush of decision and determination and super-human strength, Lucas Friar lifts the set with his fingertips and shoves it up and over his head, trying with every fiber of his being to set it back into place. “I AM Ranger Roy!” he shouts, skipping the rest of the scene to the last line of the play. In direction, and every other time he’s said it, he’s been a broken man, pathetically clinging to his identity as a Western hero when he’s been proven a fraud. This time, he will not go without a fight. There’s clearly nothing to be done but bring down the lights, which Farkle does, and cue the closing music, which Smackle does with one hand while using the other to hit a sound effect that covers the crash of the set piece falling again. They are the only sounds in the pitch-black theater—until the applause begins.

Farkle and Smackle watch the audience rise to their feet as one man, even this jaded New York crowd, hear the clapping go on so long and enthusiastically that their palms have sympathy pains. “We did it,” Smackle says, dazed.

“Of course we did,” Farkle says, still high on adrenaline, “I think there’s nothing we can’t do together, Isadora.”

Smackle looks down at the boards, her eyebrows arched above her glasses frames. “You are holding my hand.”

Her hand is small and soft and cold. He doesn’t know when he started holding onto her for dear life, but he can’t make himself regret it. “Is that all right?” he asks, knowing her disagreement would be the only thing that could make him stop.

“Yes,” she says, and twists her wrist so their fingers can interlock.

Down in the wings, Riley crushes the broken bulb of her lighted pen with the heel of her shoe and only barely refrains from tossing the prompt book in the air in sheer jubilation. “Take THAT, Thespis!” she shouts, watching with all the pride of a new mother as her cast takes bow after joyful bow. When they can’t bow anymore, they fling their arms in her direction in the traditional invitation and she runs out to join them, basking in the swell of applause but glowing because when she comes to stand in the center of the stage, her leading man bends down to kiss her cheek as he hands over a bouquet. “You are amazing,” he says solemnly.

If she was any happier, she would turn into a supernova. Rather than explode, she brushes her hair over her shoulder with her free hand and says “stop it.”

“Author!”

“Author!”

Hearing the cries, Riley initiates the summons to the other wing, where Uncle Josh is supposed to be waiting to take his own bow—a bold assumption, but she hadn’t considered it much of a gamble. The cast follows her lead, clapping and hooting; someone’s already gone to get his gift from the stagehand in charge of those things. The clapping surges again, then dies out in a dribble when he doesn’t appear. The actress holding the flowers moves them in front of her face so no one can see her confusion. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Riley shades her eyes with her hands and looks to the booth, hoping that Smarkle will have a better idea with their birds’ eye view. She mouths the question again, deliberately. Smarkle has too many other things going on to notice, but even if they did they would have no other response than a shrug. Josh isn’t in the theater.

That is, he isn’t technically in the theater. At the exact moment his absence becomes evident, he’s taking the fire escape steps to the roof two at a time, his lungs nearly bursting and his heart pounding. He trips on the last stair and ends with his hands on his knees, gasping in the smoggy foggy air.

“I’m sorry.”

Maya’s back is to him, her hair let down from the chignon she had it in earlier to serve as her jacket. He doesn’t ask her how she knows it’s him.

“Don’t be.”

“Don’t be?” She scoffs, still looking out over the city. “Josh, the set _fell over_ at the climax of the play. Sure, it was clearly an accident and no one got hurt, but it’s all anyone in that theater will remember—not the acting, not the technical work, not the script. I let everyone down.” There’s a pause. When she speaks again, her voice sounds like a raincloud. “I let _you_ down.”

Of the two, she doesn’t know which is worse. Or, scratch that, she knows exactly which one is worse but she can’t make herself believe it, because how can he outweigh nearly everyone else she cares about in the entire world, forget her own career? He’s written other plays and will write more, she’s sure; she doesn’t have to worry about him—but. She was entrusted with this one and, despite all her best efforts, she made a mess of it. Like she knew she would. Like always. “I’m so sorry,” she says again, not having any more words.

He’s so quiet behind her, she wonders if he’s gone. She wouldn’t blame him.

“Have dinner with me.”

“What?”

She turns around in spite of herself. He’s standing there with his hands shoved in the pockets of his suit, his hair ruffled from his mad dash, his chin set and his eyes full of the trademark Matthews earnestness. “You heard me the first time.”

“But,” she says slowly, “that wasn’t the deal. Opening night was a disaster.”

“Remains to be seen.” She’s going to argue, but he cuts her off. “And this is a new deal. The deal is, we go on a date anyway, because we want to, and we don’t have to wait until we know we won’t make mistakes. We go on a date because literally nothing goes right 100 percent of the time and that’s okay. We go on a date because you never let me down, and I hope—I want—just, I want to stop letting you down, too.”

Some people, Maya remembers, freeze when they’re faced with a threat. It is beyond messed up that she sees the potential of happiness as a threat, but she has always frozen in its face, unable to do anything more than slowly blink as her heart thuds like a battering ram against her protective walls. She doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, doesn’t hardly breathe.

But neither does he.

He’s not leaving, she realizes. He’s literally seen how she wrecks things and he’s still here. So he must not—be afraid of it. Or maybe—and this seems almost unbelievable—he thinks she’s worth the risk.

If he can risk it, for her, she would be a total idiot not to do the same, for him.

“You know,” she says, a smile spreading across her face and, miraculously, feeling like it belongs there, “you started out all right, but you kind of lost it at the end there. Hard to tell from that little speech that you’re a Pulitzer-winning author.”

A matching grin lights him up, and he takes one step, then another, towards her. She matches him step for step. “Probably because I’m not.”

“But you will be.” They stop about six inches away from each other, which gives her an up-close and personal view of the delight and wonder filling his eyes. She has to bite the corners of her mouth, just a little, to help her know this is really happening. “Okay. I’ll go to dinner with you. And dessert. And maybe a late-night doughnut run.”

“I never offered doughnuts.”

“Don’t begrudge a girl her doughnuts, Boing.”

“I would never,” he says, and ducks his head down and kisses her.

When _Sunset Hero_ makes a clean sweep at the Tonys in the summer, Riley reflects that doing what made her happy brought infinitely more rewards than doing what made her unhappy. Farkle shoots her a glare, though it’s hard to take him seriously when he’s got Smackle snugged into his side and they’re wearing matching formals as if they were going to prom.

“I’m just saying,” she insists, accepting the fruity drink Lucas has been a good boyfriend and retrieved, “you’re happy, I’m happy, Maya and Uncle Josh are happy, we all have a few statues for our mantels, we’ve made back our investment and then some. It’s been a good year.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“I won’t.”

“That’s what all budding dictators say,” Smackle warns.

“I don’t know anyone else who needs my help!” Riley says. Then she taps her chin thoughtfully. “Well, though, Auggie has been making noises about his company’s prima donna...”


End file.
